Security is an important topic when creating web sites. Quite a few techniques exist to compromise web servers, web browsers, or peoples information. This page serves as an overview of the various attacks that Flourish helps to prevent. While technology can help to keep sites secure, the most important part of the equation is that developers know what they are up against.

Cross-Site Request Forgery

CSRF attacks consist of malicious websites taking advantage of users being logged in to multiple web sites in a single browser, thereby allowing them to direct users to perform password protected tasks in an unauthorized manner. The fRequest class provides functionality to prevent CSRF attacks.

Cross-Site Scripting

Cross-site scripting (or XSS) is an attack that injects malicious code into a normally "safe" page. This usually takes the form of a link containing malicious content which is embedded in a page or by allowing posting of permanent data (such as blog comments) that gets embedded in the page. To prevent this type of attack, all input should be filtered and all output should be escaped. The fRequest::get() method allows for filtering input data with typecasting, while fHTML::escape() ensures that all output is properly escaped for output in HTML.

Session Fixation

Session fixation is when an attacker tricks a user into using a known session id to log into a website and then uses the same session id to access their account. The fSession class helps prevent this by setting the appropriate ini settings so that session ids can only be specified in cookies and not in the query string. The fAuthorization class takes it a step further and regenerates the session identifier whenever any new user information (such as ACLs or authorization level) is set.

Cross-Site Session Transfer

When multiple sites on a single server share the same directory to store their session files, it is possible that a user could log into a legitimate account on one site and then copy and paste the session id into the other sites session id cookie. This type of attack would allow an attacker to gain access to information of the second site as long as the $_SESSION data is structured the same as the first site.

The easiest way to prevent such an attack is to have each site use a custom directory to store session files by calling the static method fSession::setPath().

Pseudo-Random Number Generator Attacks

The pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) built into PHP includes a fairly secure seeding system to make sure that the number generated are hard to guess or replicate. Unfortunately the functions srand() and mt_srand() allow seeding the rand() and mt_rand() functions, and the seeds used are usually very insecure and can be calculated by attackers. It is also possible via a number of different techniques for an attacker to manage to reset the seed to a known value.

The fCryptography class provides functionality where the OS random number generator (/dev/urandom on BSD/Linux and the CAPICOM object on Windows) is used to seed the PRNG. If neither of those sources is available, a combination of a number of other attributes about the current server and install are used to create a seed value. Because of this functionality, the static method fCrytography::random() should always be used for random numbers and the static method fCryptography::randomString() should always be used for random strings.

SQL Injection

SQL injection is a technique where an attacker passes in a value into a site that includes SQL commands where the application is normally expecting a value to use in a query. Suppose there is a site that accepts a blog id in the query string of the blog page:

http://example.com/blogs.php?blog_id=25

This value would then be used in the SQL query to look up the appropriate blog:

If an attacker were to use a different value for the blog id, such as below, they could execute arbitrary SQL statements.

http://example.com/blogs.php?blog_id=2'%3B%20DELETE%20FROM%20blogs%3B

which would end up creating the following SQL statement:

SELECT * FROM blogs WHERE blog_id = '2'; DELETE FROM blogs;

The way to prevent such attacks is to always escape data that is being placed into a SQL query. The fDatabase class is built with this in mind, providing the static method fDatabase::escape() which allows escaping of data based on its type. In addition, each of the four different query methods allow using the same escape syntax.

Email Injection

Email injection is an attack similar to SQL injection, except that the malicious content must be placed in the $additional_headers parameter of the mail() function. Since the From: header is added to an email using this additional headers parameter, it is possible to an attacker to set additional headers or even inject full messages if user submitted data is included in the From: header.

Below is an example of code that would be vulnerable to an email injection attack:

If an attacker were to include line breaks in the name or email fields, they could add additional headers including To:, Cc:, Bcc:, Subject:, and even more like setting up a mime type. PHP automatically prevents line break characters in the $subject parameter of mail(), while the $to parameter requires a valid email address and the $message parameter would just display the headers as normal text content.

Both the fValidation and fEmail classes contain features to help prevent email injection attacks. The fValidation class includes methods to check fields for being valid email addresses and to make sure they dont include line breaks. The fEmail class provides full prevention against attacks by validating each email address and name (to, from, reply to, etc) plus the subject to ensure they dont contain vulnerabilities.

Path Disclosure

Error messages and unhandled exception messages often include full file or directory paths to documents on your server. During development it is useful to display this information so that debugging is easier. Once a site has moved to its production environment, however, these file and directory paths can be a security risk. While not a risk in an of themselves, the information is useful when combined with other attacks.

Say that a site is on a shared server with a custom session path to prevent cross-site session transfer attacks. Obviously the directory has to be readable and writable by the web server, otherwise the session files would not be saved. If the attacker was able to find the session path via an error or exception message, they could then set their application to use the same session path and execute an attack.

Path Traversal

Path traversal is an attack in which a script that uses user input to access a file is fed a path outside of the intended directory. Suppose the following URL allows downloading files from a directory:

Similarly, another option is to create some sort of whitelist of valid files and make sure the file requested is in the whitelist.

If it is not possible to create a whitelist, the function realpath() will return the canonical form of a path, resolving any ../ paths and following any symlinks. For the example above, realpath() would have returned /etc/passwd. Thus, checking the output of realpath() against the valid file directory can prevent unauthorized filesystem access:

Request Value Fixation

Request value fixation is an attack that is only effective against script that use the $_REQUEST superglobal. The $_REQUEST superglobal pulls in values from $_GET, $_POST, and $_COOKIE, in that order. This means that any value specified in a cookie with the same key as a value passed in by a query string will always resolve to the cookie value.

This type of attack would require that a users cookie be compromised, but could cause serious issues. Because of this vulnerability, the $_REQUEST superglobal should not be used. The fRequest class provides functionality to retrieve values from both the $_GET and $_POST superglobals (in that order) and provides additional useful features.

Invalid Character Encoding

Some multibyte character encodings can cause issues when escaping data, especially when creating SQL statements. The issues is that some character encodings use the \ character as a second, third or fourth byte in a multibyte sequence, however that can be combined with other characters to cause escaping to be done incorrectly.

UTF-8, the character encoding that Flourish uses for everything, does not suffer from this type of vulnerability. As a precaution, however, the static method fRequest::get() filters all incoming content through fUTF8::clean() to ensure that no malformed UTF-8 characters are present. In a similar sense, all data imported into the system should be converted to UTF-8, and cleaned to make sure no invalid characters exist.

File Uploads

File uploads can clearly be a security vulnerability if no filtering is done of user input. Malicious users could upload executables containing viruses, trojans, or any other sort of harmful content. Because of this, it is best practice to limit the accepted file types to those that are suitable for the task at hand.

The $_FILES superglobal that PHP provides to access file uploads includes a type key which contains the mime type of the file. This mime type, however, is specified by the user and should not be trusted for filtering nefarious files. The fUpload class, however, includes functionality that filters uploaded files by their mime type, with the mime type checking being done on the server side.

Password Hashing

Users' passwords should never be stored in plain text. As much as there is a desire to provide functionality such as "email me my password," the benefit is not worth the risk of an attacker obtaining a list of users and their passwords. Instead, all user passwords should be hashed and then functionality such as "reset my password" should be implemented.

Magic Quotes and Register Globals

Magic quotes and register globals are two features built into PHP that can cause security issues and affect how user input is treated in PHP.

Magic quotes (specifically the ini setting magic_quotes_gpc) tries to prevent SQL injection attacks by automatically escaping all ', ", \ and NULL characters with a \. This affects all data in the $_GET, $_POST and $_COOKIE superglobals and is enabled by default in new PHP installations. The fRequest::get() and fCookie::get() static methods will automatically detect if magic_quotes_gpc is turned on and will remove the extra escape \ characters.

Register globals is a feature where all data from the $_GET, $_POST and $_COOKIE superglobals are exported into the global scope as variables. This can very quickly lead to injection vulnerabilities and this feature should never be enabled. Register globals has been disabled by default since PHP version